(WATCH) Clean Energy


Today, a hard look at one little-discussed reality of the multi-billion-dollar green energy industry. Whether we are talking wind, solar or electric, they are marketed as environmentally friendly and clean: the opposite of dirty, polluting fossil fuels. But it’s not so simple. What we think of as clean power can take a surprising toll on the environment. We examine the difficult equation when it comes to clean and green.

In the wide, open state of Colorado they’re marching ahead with an arsenal of clean, green energy initiatives to be 100% carbon free by 2040.

Will Toor: There’s a large amount of both wind and solar generation coming into the state.

Will Toor heads up the Colorado Energy Office. He used a green mode of transportation to get to our interview at a park in Denver.

Sharyl: What is the state doing in terms of zero emission vehicles?

Toor: So there is a lot that’s happening to try to take that clean electricity and magnify its benefits by supporting the transition to electric cars.

Across the country, clean, green energy has become a key strategy for those who insist man is both hurting and capable of fixing the world’s climate.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez embodied the concern with a famously dire prediction three years ago.

Rep: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (January 21, 2019): ‘The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change, and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’

Though she later said she didn’t mean it literally. Like-minded leaders are pushing hard to discourage fossil fuel habits. And it’s big business in terms of taxpayer dollars.

President Biden’s “Build Back Better Act” proposal reportedly includes the most tax money ever spent on climate causes much of it aimed at cutting carbon dioxide sources that comes from burning coal, oil and natural gas. But amid the good intentions there’s a hard truth.

Steven Koonin: Nothing that we do in energy is really clean.

Steven Koonin was Undersecretary for Science in the Energy Department under President Obama. He says the dirty little secret is that clean energy— is not.

Koonin: Someone once said to me, “The only humans who don’t pollute are dead ones.”

Sharyl: Is clean energy, or what we think of as clean energy, less polluting though, than the traditional forms of energy we know about?

Koonin: In terms of carbon dioxide emissions, or greenhouse gas emissions, more generally, yes. But there are other pollutants, if you like, that are created in building clean energy devices that are different than conventional energy. And it’s only a question of which pollution do you prefer. Choose your poison.

So how do the most popular forms of renewable energy stand up on the clean and green front?

Sharyl: Wind seems entirely clean, because you build those big turbines or windmills and all they do is take in the wind.

Koonin: Well, first of all, wind takes a lot of land. Secondly, we’ve got to make special magnets and other components inside the wind turbine, and they consist of rare earth materials that are difficult to mine and create pollution when they’re extracted and refined. And so there are going to be waste acids, water, other minerals that you may not want in the environment, elements like mercury.

At the other end of a windmill’s life span, giant used and useless blades. Tens of thousands of them— some the length of a football field— go to landfills like this one in Casper, Wyoming. There’s an ongoing search for more wide open spaces to bury more.

Sharyl: There seem to be fewer things that are as appealing as the idea of just taking in sun power and using it.

Koonin: yeah.

But solar panels, like windmills, pollute on both ends of their life span.

Koonin: You can go to solar fields in southern California and you can see the relics of all the solar panels that people have put up. They’re just sitting there. And nobody’s doing anything to clean it up.

Sharyl: Are there chemicals and metals in there?

Koonin: Yeah. It’s all, yes, silicon, steel, other exotic metals.

Sharyl: That are not good for the environment?

Koonin: Not good for the environment. No. Currently, most of the solar panels are made in China. And where does China get the energy to do that? Coal, of course, and so-

Sharyl: So it takes coal to make solar panels to make the clean energy?

Koonin: Absolutely. Absolutely. It takes energy to do anything. And right now, the world gets 90% of its energy from carbon-based fuels.

Toor: That concern is just not accurate.

But Toor, Colorado’s Energy Czar, says in terms of clean and green, wind and solar still come out on top.

Toor: As it turns out, when you burn coal, or when you burn gasoline, you then have to run it through a rather inefficient process. So you burn gasoline and you lose about 70% of the energy to heat. You burn coal and in your most efficient power plant, you lose about half of it to heat. Whereas what you’re getting from wind and solar is directly useful energy.

So, what about the third pillar of America’s most popular clean, green energy?

Sharyl: There’s a lot of emphasis being put, for example, on electric cars so that there are not these emissions coming from cars. They rely on batteries. Is that a clean source?

Koonin: The batteries, again, lithium, not good stuff to be dealing with. Moreover, if the cars are going to run on electricity, you’ve got to get the electricity from somewhere. And right now, for most of the U.S., the grid is just about as dirty as the gasoline you would use in order to run the cars in the first place.

Sharyl: I think most of the electricity in this country is generated through fossil fuels. So just saying something is electric or battery powered doesn’t mean that a problem is being solved.

Toor: That’s an argument that made a lot of sense 15 years ago, but it’s out of date. Electricity is the one part of the economy that is dramatically shifting away from its traditional coal-based generation towards much lower emissions generation.

Sharyl: So you’re saying now when vehicles plug in for their electricity, they’re not necessarily supporting or using fossil fuel electricity?

Toor: There’s no grid that’s a hundred percent clean yet, but it is much cleaner than it used to be, and it’s much cleaner than burning gasoline in an internal combustion engine.

The challenges and debates don’t end when it comes to the calculus for nuclear, hydro and geothermal.

There does seem to be a broad agreement that alternative energy will continue to become more prevalent. Just no hard facts on what their ultimate toll on the environment will be.

Toor: I think that when you look at the current state of certainly wind and solar technology, they are just orders of magnitude cleaner than traditional fossil fuel generation. Are they perfect? No, they’re not perfect. And there was no energy technology that’s ever going to be perfect.

Sharyl: What is an overarching message or a takeaway message if we’re looking at the question of, is clean energy really clean, and where we’re headed?

Koonin: I think we can have a grid that is emitting less CO2, but it’s going to cost us more if we want to keep it reliable as well. And it will be some combination of wind and solar together with battery storage.

Sharyl: Do you think there is no role for fossil fuel in the future or very little role?

Koonin: Oh, I think fossil fuels are going to be with us for a very long time.

Sharyl (on-camera): Koonin says the biggest challenge is that we don’t yet have the technology to create a power network that is affordable, reliable and clean.

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5 thoughts on “(WATCH) Clean Energy”

  1. “Koonin: Someone once said to me, “The only humans who don’t pollute are dead ones.”

    Shush! Don’t let George Soros or Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates hear that! It might give them ideas.

    Actually, globalists have been talking about the need for massive population reduction for decades, which has fueled “conspiracy theories” that they might try to engineer population reduction via a planned pandemic or the alleged solution (a vaccine) to a planned pandemic. “Conspiracy theories” don’t arise in a vacuum.

    An alternate – but probably less efficient – means of population reduction would be to encourage birth control, abortion, and non-reproductive forms of sexuality (LGBTQ lifestyles). Coupled with this would be adopting policies which drive up the cost of single-family housing, or even multi-bedroom apartments, so that people are discouraged from having children due to the exorbitant cost of providing them with a space they can call their own.

  2. This is gonna sound way way out there, but recently I have been taking a deep dive into extraterrestrials… and believe me, it doesn’t take too much digging to discover that they have been coming to Earth for more than 75 years. And that they entered into a secret pact with Eisenhower and tptb in the 1950s to share their space craft propulsion and energy technologies with the US in exchange for some things they wanted. Eisenhower did not feel he had any choice but to acquiesce at the time.

    The clincher is that the military and high level super secret corporations now are the only groups who have harnessed the et energy technologies. If they had been made available to everyone publicly at that time early on, we would not be reliant on fossil fuels, have wars for control of them, have their pollution, etc etc etc.

    It’s a complicated subject and there is much more that could be shared, but it is past time that we all discover the truth and wake up. A good book to start with is The Day After Roswell by Admiral Philip Corso and co-author Birnes.

    Here is a summary of that book:
    “Backed by documents newly declassified through the Freedom of Information Act, Colonel Philip J. Corso (Ret.), a member of President Eisenhower’s National Security Council and former head of the Foreign Technology Desk in the US Army, has come forward to reveal his personal stewardship of alien artifacts from the Roswell crash. He tells us how he spearheaded the Army’s reverse-engineering project that led to today’s integrated circuit chips, fiber optics, lasers, and super-tenacity fibers, and “seeded” the Roswell alien technology to giants of American industry. Laying bare the US government’s shocking role in the Roswell incident—what was found, the cover-up, and how they used alien artifacts to change the course of twentieth-century history—The Day After Roswell is an extraordinary memoir that not only forces us to reconsider the past, but also our role in the universe.”

    From there follow the work of Dr Stephen Greer who has published extensively on this topic of the lost opportunities for free energy and pollutionless energy… see his youtube videos. Also watch one of his documentaries called Unacknowledged. He has researched this topic for 30 years. Another documentary of his is called Disclosure.

    There are many other researchers and military personnel who have blown the cover on these events. Dr Greer has a website page with all the interviews he has compiled from those personnel. I’ll try to find that link.

    Eisenhower meant well by convening a group of high-powered military and private industry personnel back in the 1950s to help guide the technology development from the info provided by ets… but unfortunately, he included the likes of Nelson Rockefeller and the CIA/Air Force who basically took the info and ran with it, cutting Eisenhower and others out of the loop by the creation of black projects that are untrackable. And they did the same with future presidents as well.

  3. Here is the URL for the witness videos from astronauts, pilots, many military personnel and others who share what they witnessed over the years. It was these testimonies that really convinced me of what has been going on for many years.

    This link opens to Dr. Edgar Mitchell’s video, but if you look on the left side you can see the other witness videos. There are many.

    https://www.human-et.one/posts/dr-steven-greer-astronaut-edgar-mitchell-extraterrestrial-visitation

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